Jan Müller Included in "Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro" at the Brattleboro Museum

Singing in Unison, Part 13: Homage to Meyer Schapiro
November 15, 2025 - February 15, 2026

CURATOR ESSAY

Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) trained as a scholar of Romanesque and Early Christian art, publishing seminal articles on subjects ranging from the ancient world to twentieth-century art. His writings on iconography, theory, and the semiotics of visual art were especially influential, and his interests included film, photography, psychology, sociology, and social criticism, as well as various kinds of visual art.

Schapiro’s evolution as an acute observer and defender of art history was informed by his exploration of formal analysis, Marxist interpretations, psychoanalytic critiques, and semiotics, and was integral to the collective artistic and intellectual struggles that took place during his own time. Schapiro was as comfortable in his study as he was in artists’ studios and cafés, conversing with friends and colleagues from different disciplines in the arts and humanities. His longtime friend Sir Isaiah Berlin once said, “Meyer possesses [the] lucid mind of a classic hedgehog while maintaining [the] sensuous body of a cunning fox. But any time, at will, he can swiftly turn the latter into a thinking body, and the former into a feeling mind.”

I met Meyer Schapiro and his wife Lillian in the summer of 1986. They became my close friends and mentors until his death in 1996 and hers in 2006. After our customary weekly walks—which were followed by dinners at their home in the West Village—I met their vast circle of friends and colleagues, including Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Annalee Newman, William Rubin, Barbara Rose, Allan Kaprow, Wolf Kahn, Emily Mason, Barbara White, Charles Rosen, Robert Bergman, David Shapiro, and L.S. Asekoff, among others. Most of our conversations reflected how members of this community supported each other in their shared struggle. While each individual held onto his or her desire to be a part of the dialogue of American life, they all remained at odds with conformity. They inevitably created an ideological and communal unity that could resist any political or aesthetic dogma.

In addition to being a writer, Schapiro created works of visual art, compelled by the idea, as he once wrote, that “style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the overall outlook of a group are visible.” This exhibition is a testament to the community that Schapiro and his colleagues forged together, which, in turn, gave birth to The Brooklyn Rail in October 2000. 

Singing in Unison, Part 13 features a selection of works by Schapiro alongside works by artists with whom he shared relationships at various times throughout his long and productive life. 

— Phong H. Bui, curator
Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director, The Brooklyn Rail

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

Forrest Bess, Janice Biala, Gandy Brodie, Stuart Davis, Robert De Niro, Sr., Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Jean Helion, Hans Hofmann, Wolf Kahn, Alfred Leslie, Loren MacIver, Emily Mason, Roberto Matta, Mercedes Matter, Robert Motherwell, Jan Müller, Emily Nelligan, Pat Passlof, Milton Resnick, Larry Rivers, Mark Rothko, Lucas Samaras, Meyer Schapiro, Ethel Schwabacher, Kurt Seligmann, Jonathan Silver, Bob Thompson, and Esteban Vicente

ABOUT SINGING IN UNISON

“Singing in Unison” is an ongoing series of exhibitions aimed at bringing together communities across disciplines in the arts and humanities. These exhibitions range from sprawling group shows to a direct dialogue between two artists.

Since May 2022, Rail Curatorial Projects has undertaken this ongoing series of group exhibitions as a collective effort to mobilize the art of joining and social intimacy against self-isolation and social distancing, In these exhibitions, we perceive each artist as the player of a particular instrument, having a unique and distinct sound of their own, producing a significant contribution to the total sound of the symphony.

The series has featured works made by both trained and self-taught artists, by young artists—including children from the legendary Studio in a School—and more established ones. Additionally, there are contributions from artists working during and after incarceration, as well as those who are living with various mental health conditions. Although the culture at large has frequently aimed to assimilate us all into having a similar sound, Rail Curatorial Projects is committed to celebrating each artist’s particular vibrancy, while at the same time providing a context in which they can be in dialogue with one another.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Phong H. Bui (b. Huế, Vietnam) is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1. He is based in Brooklyn, New York, and serves as the publisher and artistic director of the monthly journal The Brooklyn Rail as well as the associated Rail Curatorial Projects and Rail Editions. He was also the host and producer of the podcast “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio. 

Bui has served as a board trustee of the Miami Rail, the International Association of Art Critics, and Anthology Film Archives, and continues to serve on the boards of the Third Rail, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul, Monira Foundation, Center for Fiction, and the Lynn Foundation. He is also an advisory board member of Fountain House, Denniston Hill, Sky High Farm, and Art Omi Pavilions at Chatham. He has taught at Yale, Columbia University, and University of Pennsylvania as senior critic for their Master of Fine Art programs, and has taught graduate seminars at the School of Visual Arts in writing, criticism, photography, video, and related media.

Bui has received numerous awards, including the Compassion Award from Con-solatio (2015), an Artists Fellowship (2025), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts (2021), an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts (2020), the Jetté Award for Leadership in the Arts from the Colby College Museum of Art (2019), the Lunder Fellowship from the Lunder Institute for American Art (2019), the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Prize in Fine Art Journalism (2017), the Esther Montanez Leadership Award from Fountain House (2016), the Art in General Visionary Award (2014), the Annual Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), the Eric Isenburger Annual Prize for Installation from the National Academy Museum (2003), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1995), the Arcadia Traveling Fellowship (1998), and the Hohenberg Traveling Fellowship (1987).

RELATED EVENTS

November 15, Saturday, 5 p.m. — Opening of New Exhibits
November 16, Sunday, 1 p.m. — Curator Tour: Singing in Unison, Part 13
February 7, Saturday, 5:30 p.m. — Art Talk: Phong H. Bui and Alexander Nagel